‘But everything’s changed so fast. You go from here,’ he stabbed a finger on one thigh, ‘to here,’ he stabbed the other, ‘and you might as well have flown through the air for all you know about how you made the journey. They were talking about killing him in his bath. Naked. How that would be better. And about women blowing up their own babies. And I thought, how did we get here? Surely I never agreed to this? But I suppose Sasha would say that was political naivety.’
‘No, he would say it was pol-it-ic-al nai-eev-tay,’ said Eeva tartly. ‘I wish you’d never met Sasha.’
He didn’t reply.
‘So you’ve decided? You’re not going to be part of it?’
‘I’ve decided… but can I decide, Eevi? That’s the thing. Is there still room for me to decide? Sasha – and the others – they think I’m committed.’
‘Do you want to be?’
He thought of the house that had formerly belonged to the leather-worker. It would have been full of tools and the smell of leather, and people coming and going, wanting bits of harness mended, or a new stitching on a saddle. A man like that would serve the whole village, and farms for miles around. But the leather-worker was gone and his house was empty. Those men – Sasha’s friends – they met in it like ghosts.
I know everything about what they want to destroy, Lauri thought. But I don’t know much about what they will put in its place.
‘So they still think you’re in on it?’ asked Eeva.
He shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know any of the details. Nothing was said. Only that he’s going to be… got rid of. The Swede who was going to fire the gun, he backed out, but they’ll find another. Maybe they’ve already found another.’
‘At least they’re not thinking of teaching you to shoot,’ she said. A bubble of laughter broke from them both.
‘They’d be waiting a long time,’ he said. ‘But they’ve got more in mind for me than they had before, I’m sure of that. A more important role,’ he added, emphasizing the word that was Sasha’s.
‘Does Sasha know, do you think?’
He shrugged again. ‘It’s beyond me. I can’t make it out. I’m not even sure that they –’
‘That they what?’
‘Trust Sasha.’ He wouldn’t tell her about Sasha burning his own skin, and the smell of it in the room, or the way the man in the fox-fur hat had wrinkled his nose fastidiously, as if Sasha had farted in the middle of a handsome dinner.
She sat there thinking. At last she said, ‘The trouble is that you’ve already heard too much. And you’ve seen them all? Their faces and everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they’re not people we know?’
‘None of them. The only one of them I knew was Sasha.’
‘Did you hear their names?’
‘No one gave any names.’ It was so. He’d noticed it at the time and he hadn’t liked it. The Russians hadn’t even addressed each other by name and patronymic. The man in the fox-fur hat and the small Russian had called Sasha ‘Aleksandr Kirillovich’. But of course Lauri had known Sasha’s name already. The Swede had gone out without a word.
‘They were high-ups, then.’ She pondered for a while. ‘Isn’t it strange,’ she observed,’ how everything comes out like that? Every organization has its own high-ups, its own order, even if it starts out without one. I suppose you can’t get away from it –’
‘They rise to the top like cream,’ said Lauri, thinking of the Russian in his fine wool coat with its fox-fur cuffs and collar. ‘One lot of cream replaces another.’
‘No,’ she said with a passion that startled him. ‘That’s not true. Cream rises, because it’s in its nature to do that. But people don’t just rise like that. They claw their way up, and then they trample on those who are beneath them. There are some who’d claw their way to the top over a pile of corpses.’
They were both silent for a while. At last he said, ‘I suppose you’re right. But the thing is that I still feel I’m letting them down.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, not them. Not that lot at the meeting. But all my mates. People like Hannu and Eero and Fedya, and everybody else. The ones who come to political education, and give out leaflets in the factories even though they’ll lose their jobs if they get caught. And they’ll put their hands in their pockets for a man who’s sick or out of work. They think together, they don’t always think separately, about themselves. And that’s what we’ve got to do, isn’t it? They’re the ones I’m thinking of.
‘I’m not sure, Eevi, and that’s the truth. Am I letting them down? Because in the end maybe that little Russian is right and I’m wrong. I don’t like what he said, but maybe there’s no other way. You have to –’ his teeth clenched into what looked like an angry smile – ‘you have to break eggs. Because if you don’t, it all goes on for ever in the same way. Suffering. Injustices. That same as what happened to you, Eeva. The way they carted you off. Haven’t we got to fight them? What would your father think of us, or mine? We can’t shut the door and live behind it. Not even if we had a room, and our own door.’
She frowned, concentrating. The look on her face made him remember how she would read and study by candlelight, all those years ago. She’d set up her little card table and work away, and everyone respected it. There was force in Eeva, there always had been. Men who visited her father would stop behind her chair and maybe touch her shoulder. ‘That’s right, you keep at it. That’s the way. She’s a proper scholar, your Eeva, isn’t she?’ they’d remark to Pekka.
‘That’s true,’ said Eeva. ‘You can’t shut the door, not if it means pretending that things aren’t what they are. You don’t have to… to abandon the struggle,’ she went on, consciously using one of the phrases that always made her feel as if she had cloth in her mouth. ‘I’m not asking you to do that. But you have to preserve yourself, too.’
‘You mean, save my own skin. Put myself and my blessed conscience first,’ he said bitterly.
‘No, I don’t mean that. Preserve yourself – I mean, keep yourself what you are. Because if you’re no longer yourself, you’re not Lauri any more, then what use can you be to anyone? What’s the point of the new world you’ve made? Look at Sasha. He’s not right, is he? Nothing’s real with him. Deep down he’s watching and laughing at everything. Don’t you feel it?’
‘Maybe,’ he answered reluctantly.
‘You don’t have to agree with me. I know he’s your friend.’
‘Yes.’
He sat brooding.
‘Maybe our lives aren’t the important ones,’ he said at last. ‘We sink down into the mud. We betray ourselves until there’s only our bones left. But maybe it all happens for a reason. We sink down into the mud, so that those who are to come can build on us. We’re like a – like a foundation.’
‘You can’t think that,’ she said. She came in close to him and the smell of her hair and skin filled his senses. ‘You can’t think that we don’t matter, when this is our only life.’
‘Yes.’
‘And when you’re everything…’
‘What?’
He turned to face her, looked hungrily into her dark, light-filled eyes.
‘You’re everything, to me.’
‘Eevi –’
‘It’s true.’
His eyes prickled, burning just as his feet had burned while the blood came back into them. Her words echoed in his head. Our only life. Our only life. Yes, that was what it was. He was here, with Eevi, living his only life.
He leaned towards her, and touched her lips with his. They barely moved, barely kissed. How soft her lips were, full and a little dry with winter. She’d closed her eyes.
Neither of them moved. They seemed to have grown together, as if their lips joined and spoke for their whole bodies. How much time passed then he never knew, and never could guess.
She stirred and moved away from him, smoothing down her hair with both hands.
‘Sasha,’ she said
. ‘I’ve worked out what it is about him. You know when you were talking about our fathers? They were working to an end, like you said. Educating people, getting them to organize, improve working conditions, living conditions – all that was what we grew up with.’
‘They were doing a bit more than that. It wasn’t all roses.’
‘I know. But what I’m saying is that for them, political activism was a means to an end. For Sasha it’s an end in itself. He wants things to be overthrown, to dissolve. That’s what he likes – no, it’s what he needs. Everything falling apart.’
‘But don’t things have to fall apart, so that they can be put together differently?’
‘Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself properly. What I mean is that for Sasha the falling apart is the whole point of it. It’s what he wants, what he longs for. The putting together bit doesn’t really interest him at all, although he has to pretend it does.’
‘You’re making him sound like an Anarchist, but he’s not.’
‘He’s not anything, don’t you see? He just wants chaos. That’s why he steals. He’s got no call to steal. Why don’t you steal? Why don’t I steal? God knows we’ve needed things badly enough, and haven’t had them. And wanted them.’
‘Because we don’t want to get caught.’
‘It isn’t only that. I can’t see you coming into our bookshop and slipping a book under your coat and walking out with it. I just can’t picture it.’
‘I couldn’t be bothered with all that.’
‘No. But what I’m afraid of is that for Sasha, killing could be the same as stealing. There’ll always be a reason for it, a very important reason. He’s so convincing. He’ll almost make himself believe that whoever gets murdered, it’s done because it has to be done.
‘You must have heard him going on about surgeons cutting a cancer out of a body. But the truth is that any killing Sasha’s involved in won’t have anything to do with cancer or surgeons. It’ll be done because he wants to do it. And that’s what he wants to drag you into.’
‘Let’s not talk about it any more now, Eevi.’
She got up, picked his coat off the floor, and brushed it with her hand.
‘I wish you had a better coat. Look at this.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I’m going to sew more padding into it. Look how thin it is here – and here – all worn away –’
‘You’ve enough to do, leave it.’
‘I’d like to do it.’
She smiled, holding the coat to her. ‘I’ve always liked sewing. In the House of Orphans, I used to make pinafores for the little ones. The thing was, when you were sewing you were sitting down, and close to the stove as well, because your fingers have to be warm to sew quickly Otherwise you get stiff fingers, you see, and you don’t go so fast. Anna-Liisa knew that. She was very practical in those ways. One of the girls told me when I arrived: “Say you can sew”
‘But Lauri, you haven’t had anything to eat. I’ll heat the stew.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Not yet.’
She opened out the little table that she and Magda used for coffee. It looked exactly the same as the card table she used to study at, years ago.
‘Did this come from your father?’
She looked surprised. ‘No, I’ve nothing of his except some books. All this stuff is Magda’s. She even gave me a set of sheets.’
‘You get on well with her, don’t you?’ he said rather gloomily.
‘Sometimes I don’t like her all that much. But it doesn’t matter. She’s the sort of person you love rather than like.’
He was silent, shocked. Surely he’d never even heard Eeva say she loved her own father.
‘Look at her tonight,’ went on Eeva. ‘It’s way past the time she should be back from the concert. She’ll have gone off to stay with a friend somewhere, because she knows you’re coming here. And she’s quite jealous of you in a funny way. I don’t know why.’
‘Like Sasha.’
‘No, not like Sasha. Exactly not like Sasha, and that’s the point. Magda’s a bit jealous, and we both know it, but tomorrow she’ll pretend she bumped into an old friend she hadn’t seen for a long time, and they couldn’t stop talking so they went back to drink coffee or whatever. She’ll even say she hopes I wasn’t worried. All that, just so that I won’t feel she’s made a sacrifice for me.’
‘Not such a great sacrifice, spending a night at a friend’s.’
‘No, maybe not. And Magda’s friends are well-off, some of them, they have spare rooms and everything. I’m not saying she’s perfect. But she’s kind, Lauri, she really is kind. It’s the same with all this stuff This furniture and everything. You wouldn’t guess it was Magda’s. She really believes that sheets and tables and cups belong to those who need to use them. No, that’s not it – what it is: she doesn’t even think about believing it or not believing it.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Lauri. Eeva laughed.
‘I know, now you’re jealous.’
‘I’m not jealous! What should I be jealous of?’
‘I’m not saying you’ve got anything to be jealous about, only that you are. I’ll get the stew for you. Those dumplings should be ready by now.’
The beef stew had grown thicker, richer, stickier. The vegetables were almost dissolved into it. But she’d cooked the dumplings fresh, and they were the best he’d ever tasted, he told her. So light.
‘I put a lot of parsley in them.’
Yes, now he could taste it. A sharp green scent. He sopped the last of his dumpling in gravy and swallowed it. Immediately she was on her feet to bring more.
‘Don’t you need to keep some for tomorrow?’
‘No.’ She scraped the pot onto his plate. ‘Magda ate before she went out, so I don’t need to leave any for her.’
‘But what about for yourself?’
‘I’m eating well. Look at me.’
‘It’s true. You look well.’
‘We cook every day. We sit down together and talk and eat. The food seems to do you good that way. I had as much as I wanted at the doctor’s house, but I always ate on my own. You don’t have the appetite for it when you’re alone.’
‘I like to eat with you,’ he said.
She blushed a little, and said quickly, ‘We can’t always rise to beef stew and dumplings.’
‘You know I didn’t mean that. I meant, to be with you. To eat with you sitting at the other side of the table.’
She dropped her gaze. Now they were shy with each other as if they’d never lain naked in bed together. He’d thought that with a girl when you moved forward, you stayed there, but it seemed that this was different. Sometimes you found yourself back where you’d been before, wanting to touch but not feeling you had the right. He bent over his plate, finished the last of the stew, and wiped the plate with bread.
‘It’s very late,’ she said in a neutral voice.
‘Yes, it must be.’
Did she understand that he could not bear to go out there again? To leave the circle of warmth and light and put on his socks, his boots, all the layers that tried to keep the cold out. But no matter how hard you tried it crept in and froze you. He could not bear to walk away from her house, down the late, quiet streets, to the room he shared with Sasha.
‘Magda won’t come back now. It’s too late,’ she said.
He reached towards her left hand, which was lying on the table. The sleeve of her dress was rolled back, because she’d been cooking. Gently, he turned her hand over. The skin of her wrist was beautiful.
‘If I met you after twenty years and I only saw this much of your hand,’ he said, putting his fingers an inch apart, ‘I’d know it was you.’
She shivered. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not? It’s true. I would know you.’
‘I don’t like thinking about it.’
He stroked her skin where the blue came up near the surface.
&nbs
p; ‘I couldn’t do without you,’ he said very quietly, so she hardly heard him. But soft though the words were, she was sure of them.
She saw it all lying in front of them. It was like walking out of the forest onto the shore of a huge lake. There they were, blinking in sudden light, with all their days ahead of them.
‘Yes,’ she said, and took his hand, raised it to her face and gently bit his knuckles. Suddenly she thought of the doctor, walking alone with his head down, lost in thought, his shoulders a little bowed. But when he caught sight of her, his face would open into a smile that made her feel older than him. A smile that had something naked and timid in it, and changed his face completely. He hadn’t been the master then.
Her forehead contracted. She screwed her eyes shut. No, she wasn’t going to think of the doctor. He had had his life.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. Lauri, don’t tell Sasha.’
‘Don’t tell him what?’
‘What you told me. That you aren’t going to go on with it.’
‘He’s got to know sometime.’
‘Not yet. There’s no telling what he might do. Those others mustn’t know.’
They both sat silent, thinking of it. For some reason all Lauri could call to mind was Sasha laughing. His eyes shining like toffee, his lips moist, the points of his teeth gleaming.
‘Hush!’ said Eeva sharply. ‘Did you hear something?’
He listened. From the landing there came a faint scuffle.
‘There!’